1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to a system and method for part management, and more particularly, to a system and method for checking data stored in a database system used for the part management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Designing a product constituted by a large number of parts, such as an automobile, requires appropriate parts management. Large number of parts forces manufactures to deal with a large amount of information on the parts, and thus efficient parts management is helpful to design that product.
Parts management is often achieved by an electronic parts list system. An exemplary parts list system includes one or more databases that store an electronic parts list and drawings of the associated parts. The electronic parts list typically includes a list of items that constitute an apparatus, a list of parts that constitute each of the items, number of parts, part-specific information that typically includes a history of revision of designs of the specific part, a manner of installation of each part, and so on. The drawings, which show the configurations of the parts, are usually attached with various information, such as respective names of items and parts, and a list of parts that constitutes each of the items and the parts shown in the drawings. The attached information is used for parts management.
Efficient parts management requires necessary data to be surely stored according to a predetermined role in a database(s) used for the parts management. Lack of data necessary for parts management hinders efficient parts management. Therefore, the existence of the necessary data in the database(s) is desirably checked.
Especially, the conformity of part numbers in the databases is of much importance. The part number associates various data to the parts, and a wrong part number hinders efficient parts management.
Therefore, the conformity of data on the parts, especially part numbers, is desirably checked. However, a large number of the parts make it difficult to check the conformity of the data.
A need exists to provide a system and method for checking the data in a database system used for the part management.